GigaVox Levelator - the most important thing to happen at Portable Media Expo 2006

I didn’t make it to the Portable Media and Podcast Expo down in Ontario, California this year. I went last year, and had a great time. Met a ton of people at various stages of their podcast careers. Some have faded away, and others have found success. I came home with lots of thoughts about my approach to podcasting, and ultimately, because of all that, shifted to an occasional podcast when appropriate, like Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, rather than holding myself to trying to do a regular “show” like Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code.

At any rate, I’ve been following PME via the blogosphere this year. Paul Colligan has provided pretty good coverage from the angle of someone interested in the commercial possibilities, and the “portablemediaexpo” tag on Flickr has had lots of photos to get a general feel for the event.

Even though I wasn’t there in person, I wanted to write about what I feel is the most significant thing to happen at PME this year - GigaVox Media released “The Levelator” - a free application for Windows and Mac that acts like a compressor/limiter, and does some fancy RMS normalization. Doug Kaye teased us with the promise of an app like this last year at PME, and the wait was worth it.

If you’ve ever recorded a podcast with two or more people, or various sound clips, and tried to get them all to sound equally loud (levels) using something like Audacity or Adobe Audition, then you know it’s a time consuming and frustrating process. The Levelator does all of that for you like magic. Really. Magic. Simply drop your audio file on it, and it will churn out a file with near perfect levels. Basically, it does in software post-production what it would take thousands of dollars of audio equipment and a skilled recording engineer to do “live”.

I’ve tried it on some audio files I had laying around, and hadn’t published because I needed to fix the levels, and hadn’t found the time to do it manually. The Levelator works like a charm. I’m really impressed so far, and I’m going to recommend it to all the people I know who produce podcasts.

If you do audio production, give it a try, and see if it earns a place in your workflow. It definitely has in mine. Many thanks to Doug, Michael, Bruce, Malcolm, Paul, and all the others that probably had a hand in this amazingly useful tool. And thanks for making it free. GigaVox Media and the Conversations Network continue to make enormous contributions to the world of podcasting. You guys rock!

Portland Social Media Association

The Portland Podcasting group is being rebirthed as the Portland Social Media Association - we'll have the website www.portlandsocialmedia.com up shortly.
The PSMA will help us move beyond discussions of just podcasting and into the many other developing and excting social media areas; like,

videoblogging
photoblogging
blogging
wikis
social media services
social bookmarking
massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) - i.e. Second Life
social networks
viral video

So, in order for us to get started, we've put together a survey we'd like you to take - there's only two questions, so easy! You'll find the Portland Social Media survey at SurveyMonkey.

Mailing List

Are you on the Portland Podcasting mailing list? If not -- here is the form:

http://www.deltaparkproject.com/meetup/

happy+middle - Vodcast

Suburban Fight Society

From the creators of the Delta Park Project comes - happy+middle.

happy+middle is a weekly sketch comedy vodcast that aims to mildly amuse you. Based in Portland, Oregon the show is a lot like SNL only it isn't on TV and isn't released on Saturdays.

The crew is made up of 3 improv actors; a professional videographer/editor; a former television producer and a dietitian (of course).

The first video is called 'Suburban Fight Society' and is a Fight Club spoof centering on a group of suburbanites who get together in a garage to talk, laugh and hit each other with chairs.

You can find the show at:

http://www.happymiddle.com

and subscribe to the feed at:

http://feeds.happymiddle.com/happymiddle

OMSI Podcast

This weekend I was thinking, "I wonder if OMSI has a podcast?"—the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Yep, they do.

Hey kids (if there are any reading), have any questions you really want answered by a scientist? Well, submit your quesitons and one will answer it on the next podcast (great idea!).

Tags: OMSI, podcasting, science, education

GoDaddy Launches Podcast Service

The new service, Quick Podcast, offers podcasters hosting and publishing services starting at $5 a month.

read more | digg story

July's Meeting Recap

We had a great meetup on the 12th at Urban Grind coffeehouse. Jason from the Delta Park Project gave us a sneak peek into what Anna and him are cooking up for you later this summer - you'll love it.

Diane from CraftyPod made an appearance; which was great because she'd been trying to come out for a while. CraftyPod is the perfect podcast for those into making stuff. The podcast covers a lot of ground and the topics change each show; great for those uber-craftsters just fiening for challenging projects.

I think Diane understood everything we said; it's tough, sometimes we cover a lot of ground when the conversations starts going. But, if you're looking for more information, tips and hints on growing your podcast or video podcast, make sure to check us out - we meet once a month at the Urban Grind coffeehouse in NE Portland.

Spam and Forum Changes

I've been deleting a couple of nasty porn spam posts from the forums about once a day, and I'm tired of it. I had changed the permissions so that only registered users could post, so the spammers just registered and kept posting.

So now, I've made it so that only Moderators can post to the forums. "But," you say, "I'm not a moderator! How am I going to post?"

Simple. Go make yourself a moderator. I made the Moderators group "open", so you can join it by logging into the forums, and going to the usergroups page. Choose to join Moderators, and you should be good.

Now, this gives you a little extra power with regard to what you can do on the forums, but our community is tight enough that I trust you guys. Any abuses will cause me to change my mind. And if the freaking spammers join the Moderators group to continue to post, well, I'll have to take more drastic action.

Let me know if you have any questions.